PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS

In my previous post I cited a 2008 essay in which I argued that "big events" in commercial comics were nothing new; that the industry had started using such events at least in the 1960s. I associated this old essay with one subject covered by the YouTube link I provided, in which author Yellow Flash argued that the Big Two companies in the US had become dependent upon rebooting their franchises in order to boost sales. Yellow Flash offers an interesting parallel to the 2008 jeremiad of one Dick Hyacinth, in which the latter was arguing that "story values" were being neglected in favor of "big events." But the new version of the old argument is that because of the dominance of Modern Progressive values in the Big Two comics, those comics have lost their readership, principally though not exclusively to American reprints of Japanese manga-- which presumably appeal to their audience thanks to the aforementioned "story values."

This line of thought got me wondering, though: when do fan-writers say that the Progressive Era of American comics got started? It's of personal interest to me since, as I stated in the previous essay, I feel that I was "cancelled" because of a Progressive author (little though the cancellation mattered to my overall welfare). But it also bears upon the history of this blog. Unlike, say, the defunct HOODED UTILITARIAN, the ARCHIVE has never been primarily political. But I like to think that even in the late 2000s I took a lot of shots at flawed thinking both liberal and conservative, even if it often took the form of picking at the statements of Heidi McDonald. However, I'll freely admit that since I stopped buying a lot of comics in the middle 2000s, I didn't personally witness the rise of the Progressive Wave in American comics.

So where did it start, the "patient zero" of Comics Progressivism? I found two distinct answers on YouTube.

The podcaster Thinking Critically focuses in this essay on the 2007 rise of the website Comics Alliance. It's a good if biased examination of the Progressive mindset of the period. However, Comics Alliance was just a bunch of vocal fans, with no real power to change things, unless people in the industry chose to regard them as a bellwether. Liberal ideology had come to dominate comic book fandom since the Silver Age, and a lot of liberal fans continually stumped for more diverse racial representation, more equitable treatment of female characters, and so on. But the industry did not change from the impact of fans alone.

Probably more on target is this essay from The Fourth Age. The author cites Joe Quesada as his "patient zero," though I would somewhat fault the essay for not providing more context for Quesada's career from 2000, when he became Marvel editor-in-chief, to 2009, when Quesada took the fatal step that bound his star to that of the Progressives. This act, according to Fourth Age, was the "diversity hire" of Muslim-American writer Sana Amanat, still best known today for her co-creation in 2014 of the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel. In this Wikipedia quote, Amanat herself mentions that she was hired to bring a "different voice" to Marvel Comics:

According to Amanat, an executive at Marvel approached her for the job because she was different from their average employee. She said that the executive told her she had "something different to offer than the regular fanboy who has read comics since he was a kid. She has a different voice, and they need her voice in order to change Marvel."

Fourth Age extensively quotes Quesada in support of the thesis that Quesada, believing that the hardcore comics-audience was not enough to sustain his company's fortunes, sought to enhance Marvel's reputation for diversity with a "non-fanboy" readership. Roughly twelve years later, there's no evidence that Progressive comics wooed a new readership to the medium, and that despite what might have been a vital cross-fertilization from the MCU movies, beginning with the 2008 IRON MAN. Quesada's hiring of Amanat might not be quite as consequential in itself as Fourth Age asserts, but there can be little doubt that Marvel Comics, and possibly DC to a lesser extent, became very concerned with projecting the image of diversity in many if not all of their projects. What I see happening is that established hardcore fans who already held Progressive sympathies became emboldened by the diversity agenda, while others reacted against the politicization, one reaction being the somewhat later Comicsgate conflict of the late 2010s. 

Of course all of these things happened within the greater context of American political events, and perhaps Sana Amanat's hiring mirrors in a small way the ascension of Barack Obama to the Presidency that same year. As yet I have not found a good overall history of the rise of Progressive Liberals, but I would imagine that their agenda too was given an ideological boost by Obama's election, particularly their endorsement of intersectional representationalism. Quesada was clearly seeking to be intersectional by hiring a Muslim-American woman who in 2009 had little experience in writing commercial comics. That said, her early issues of MS. MARVEL (the only ones I read) are at least pleasant and not infected with the fanatical righteousness I've found in the few Progressive comics-writers I've encountered. 

I should also stress that under the right circumstances, a "diversity hire" can be a good thing. Prior to Gail Simone being hired by DC Comics, she was best known for launching the 1999 website WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS and for a Comic Book Resources column. She may or may not have been a diversity hire, though there were so few female creators at Marvel and DC in the early 2000s that her hiring would have had the same effect, regardless of intention. However, in contrast to Sana Amanat, Simone showed with her long run on DC's BIRDS OF PREY (2003-07) that she was fully engaged with superhero mythology and the expectations of its "fanboys." I disputed WOMEN IN REFRIGATORS' flawed logic in my essay NEGATIVE I.D., but I found BIRDS OF PREY to be more engaging than its author's ideology, and unlike MS. MARVEL I followed the former to Simone's final issues (and a little beyond). Though PREY focused on boosting the reputations of DC's female characters from a POV of a female author, I recall none of the viciously divisive ideology of the Progressive feminists, no harping on toxic masculinity and the like. 

In conclusion, I'm now of the opinion that a lot of the Progressive measures of the 21st century were a politicized version of "big events"-- the Falcon becomes the new Captain America, Carol Danvers takes on both the name of Captain Marvel and assumes the status of "The Marvel Comics Wonder Woman." Most of these I admit I have not read, so that I can't be entirely sure that they lack all "story values." But the comics-reading audience certainly favors the story values of Japanese manga-- some of which may not even be all that remarkable, like (say) the popular NARUTO-- and it would appear that the comics industry's link to cinema is the only thing that keeps Patient Zero on life-support.

"SNAP BACK" VS. "LOST CHANCE"

I posted this today on CHFB:

________________

I recently came across a link to a Gail Simone twitter-thread that addresses some of the comments on this thread (about the BIRDS OF PREY film).

Simone, as some here will know, is famous for being one of the most celebrated BIRDS OF PREY scripters. Her twitter defends the right of the filmmakers to go "off model," saying in part:

I believe the truly great characters are elastic. You can pull them and bend them, you can stretch them. The great ones snap back. We all know what their core is. They snap back.

Now, the fact that Simone liked the film, and doesn't feel offended by the filmmakers' changes, doesn't in itself make me feel obliged to like the film. For all we know, she may have been as offended as any of us by other films in which comics characters got changed about.

In some ways, the "snap back" theory-- which I''ll attribute to Simone even though I'm sure others have voiced similar things--  is the inverse of the old "lost chance" theory. Back in the sixties, hardcore comics fans resented the Batman live-action show, because it traduced the more serious stories in the comic book. To these fans, the Batman TV show was a lost chance to show the fans' favored character in a good light, to explain to outsiders why they the fans found the character appealing and not merely "kid stuff."

The eventual fate of Batman, of course, would seem to validate Simone's "snap back" theory.  Probably no non-fans in the sixties were enthralled enough with the show to start buying Batman comics. Yet both the Bat-mania that briefly captivated an adult audience and subsequent re-runs of the sixties show, gave Batman a lot more media-currency than he'd ever had before. In the seventies comic-book Batman "snapped back" to a level of quality far beyond those of the mid-sixties "New Look" stories. It's even arguable that some comics-creators brought back "Dark Gothic Batman" as a reaction against the TV show's version, which I'm tempted to call "Candyland Batman." Tim Burton's 1989 BATMAN capitalized on this mode, and some publicity at the time even speculated about whether or not a "serious Batman" could prosper after the example of the sixties teleseries.

All of this doesn't mean that there are no situations in which a bad version of a concept or series poisons the well. The box-office failure of 1997's BATMAN AND ROBIN certainly kept the Big Bat off the live-action screen for a time, though it didn't hurt the character so much that he couldn't recover from the debacle, either in comics or in other media. On the other hand, for some characters there really was just one shot at success, and a mediocre adaptation can undermine future potential-- as witness the ancillary results of 1986's HOWARD THE DUCK.

I don't think total fidelity to the original comics is necessarily a solution, either. For me, all arguments regarding the role of fidelity boil down to one formula:

"There are good changes, and there are bad changes."

As to what makes one change good and another bad-- that can only measured through the lens of subjective perception.

SHADOW BOXING WITH BATGIRL'S GREATEST ENEMY

Just to get the title-explanation out of the way, the "greatest enemy" of Batgirl-- and indeed, of most if not all fictional characters-- is the ideological critic, the sort who reads fiction in order to see only what he wants to see. I've already critiqued the misrepresentations of Ennbee's Guardian essay on the KILLING JOKE DVD, and I truly meant to leave it at that. But it occurred to me that are deeper issues involved in the ideological reading of KILLING JOKE than just whether or not a given critic renders a careless, ideologically over-determined reading.

A bigger issue is that ideological critics like Ennbee are unable to understand the inevitable contradictions inherent in their position. For instance, here's Ennbee arguing that even if the DVD adaptation had been better than the source material, it still would have been a bad idea:

Rebooting stories that are racist and sexist is one way that racist and sexist narratives and ideas get replicated and perpetuated. You can sometimes change the story and make it better – and then, sometimes, you can’t. The Killing Joke didn’t have to be as wretched in cartoon form as it turned out to be, but remaking it was always going to be a bad idea.

Now, here's Ennbee arguing for what DC Animation should have done, rather than perpetuating an evil sexist story:

Instead, maybe, DC could have done an animated Birds of Prey – a series in which numerous female superheroes, not least Barbara Gordon, fight crime together without having to ask Batman for permission. 

As I mentioned in the previous essay, Ennbee made no mention of the film's allusion to Barbara Gordon becoming Oracle at the end; of continuing her heroic activities in another manner. This by itself is mere sloppiness on his part. But Ennbee's real whopper is that he doesn't even get that without the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE, there is no BIRDS OF PREY, at least in the historical sense.

Sure, it's *theoretically* possible that, had DC never published any story in which Barbara Gordon or anyone else was shot and paralyzed, the company could have published its first all-female team-book without such a character: without "Barbara Gordon in her new identity as Oracle." Such a book would still have to employ any number of narrative contortions to satisfy Ennbee's political purity test, of course. But from what Ennbee wrote in the Guardian essay, one would never know that BIRDS OF PREY was in any way dependent on the events of the Moore-Bolland work. He makes it sound like BOP was totally untainted by the events of the very graphic novel that, quite unintentionally, determined a new direction for the then-moribund adventures of Barbara Gordon.

To sum up briefly: Moore asked DC for permission to have Batgirl be crippled by the Joker in KILLING JOKE. Later he stated that he never expected the character to remain a paraplegic, given the many miracle-cures abounding in the DC Universe, and indeed DC did toy with the idea of reviving Batgirl via one such cure, "the Lazarus Pit" of Ra's Al Ghul. This idea was dropped, and credit for a better direction is usually given to writers Kim Yale and John Ostrander, who spearheaded the idea of reconfiguring Gordon as a mysterious dispenser of information to the superhero community. Thus Oracle made her debut roughly a year after her fate in KILLING JOKE, in Ostrander's SUICIDE SQUAD #23.

Once the character was revealed to be the now-paraplegic Barbara Gordon, she became a more prominent player in the DC Universe, particularly in the Bat-corner of that cosmos. This new role-- which gave Gordon greater prominence than she had enjoyed as Batgirl in the late 1980s-- engendered a one-shot team-up with Black Canary in 1996, which in its turn led to the regular BOP title.

To be sure, the first fifty-plus issues of the regular series, largely scripted by Chuck Dixon, were basically no more than decent formulaic action-stories. Gail Simone, debuting on BOP #56 in 2003, distinguished herself on the title and made both the character of Oracle and the feature's "girl power" theme more appealing to fans. 

Now, though I consider Simone's contribution to the BOP concept to be vital in a creative sense, there's no question in my mind that from first to last, BIRDS OF PREY is intimately tied to the supposedly sexist injuries inflicted on Barbara Gordon by Moore and Bolland. I have no idea whether Ennbee thinks well of the comic book itself, though he certainly seems to be stumping for an adaptation, if only one produced by female creators. 

In earlier years Simone apparently agreed to some extent with Ennbee's characterization of KILLING JOKE as sexist, for she listed Batgirl's paralysis as one of the casualties of dastardly male creators on her WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS site.  In this essay I expressed my disapproval of Simone for ham-handedly listing characters regardless of the context of their suffering in each given narrative, and over the years I've become (in contrast to Ennbee) even less sympathetic to the "WIR" complaint. But Simone's protest against female marginalization becomes even more ironic, when one realizes that BOP was her first major success in the comic-book field, and that her success stemmed in large part from the fact that DC readers were invested in the fate of Paraplegic Barbara Gordon. That Simone wrote some really good stories with PBG-- quite possibly better than anything Alleged Misogynist Alan Moore could have rendered, given the same subject-- does not obviate Simone's indebtedness to Moore's 1988 ambition desire to shock his complacent audience with an event of arresting violence. That indebtedness also does not "go away" even if Modern Moore recants his 1988 ambitions. BIRDS OF PREY, DC Comics' first all-female team-title, owes its existence to the Big Event of a heroine being sliced, diced, and stuck in a Frigidaire-- though it appears that even before Simone, Yale or Ostrander became involved, there was always the possibility of a Resurrection from the Refrigerator.

To explain the other part of the title now: this complaint comes down to mere "shadow boxing" with the ranks of ideological critics in general. From experience I know that, should I post my analysis of Ennbee's faulty logic on HU, Ennbee would not be capable of arguing any of my points. He has established a persona whereby everything he writes is for the betterment of marginalized people, so if you challenge him on logic or anything else, you must be a low-down defender of the status quo. I would be curious to know if Gail Simone perceived herself in any way indebted to Moore, but from what little I know of her during her Comic Book Resources, she has never really forsworn WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, so that may not be a likely scenario either.

At the end of NEGATIVE I.D. I said that "one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same." Even if I agreed with Ennbee that the gut-shooting of Barbara Gordon marked Moore, Bolland and DC Comics as unregenerate masculinists-- which I don't-- I would still contend that what didn't kill Barbara Gordon made her stronger, rather than reducing her to a victim. Simone herself pursued that theme in BIRDS OF PREY more than once, and any animated adaptation of the property that didn't allow Barbara Gordon to suffer for a good narrative reason would surely end up as far worse than the 2016 KILLING JOKE.

DUCK SHOOT AT THE ANTI-EMBODIMENT CORRAL, PART 1

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I said:

As discussed in EMBODIMENT, it's stunningly inaccurate to assume that male characters are less sexualized simply because they are dominantly "covered from head to toe."  What I believe Thompson truly objects to is the *feeling* of greater exposure for the heroines; the sense that they are always being subjected to the "male gaze" as promulgated by Laura Mulvey.

And in QUICK SEX-COVER-UP REMARK I noted this offhand comment by one Charles Reece:

"I don’t have any stats on any of this, but just based on the gals and guys I know and see, for the most part, the former prefer wearing more revealing clothing than the latter. Superheroes just kind of replicate that tendency in a more exaggerated manner. The men who walk around in cutoffs or with their shirt open to the navel or in half shirts tend to be gay or aging rockers."

While Reece and I are miles apart in most if not all ideological stances, I would agree, purely on an observational basis, that men tend to cover up and women tend to reveal, however strategically, as per the example I mentioned before:

If Kelly Thompson surveyed Hollywood musicals the same way she surveyed superhero comic books, would she come to the conclusion that they too are guilty of objectification and hyper-sexualization purely in terms of that one element:  how covered men are and how uncovered women are? 

That would be an unfair question were I asking it in more than a broadly comparative sense.  Clearly Thompson's essay indicts current American superhero comics for more than just the covered/uncovered dichotomy.  Nevertheless, because Thompson is busy assailing the forces of objectification in the superhero comic, I find it a fault that she does not consider that there might be other factors at work in the way comic book professionals portray male and female characters.  I suggest that in American culture it's typical to identify "maleness" with a process of concealment, in which one dons a Brooks Brothers suit as a knight dons his suit of armor, and "femaleness" with a process of partial revealment, wherein the female, when making a display of herself not only for men but also for other women in her immediate society, must strike a balance between showing her appearance off to best effect without showing off too much and thus being "slutty."

Sometimes comic books actually get the balance of sexual representation correct, as per this fan-favorite scene from BIRDS OF PREY #104:

  

The above scene, in my opinion, would not be an unfair depiction of male and female tendencies of dress, as it's based on current cultural imperatives as to how males and females dress at social affairs.  By extension, I don't necessarily regard it as a vile male conspiracy simply because none of the male members of the X-Men dress as revealingly as Storm, much less the White Queen. I make no bones about the fact that most superhero comics are written to a male audience, which means that they are likely to remain more heavily invested in cheesecake than in beefcake.  That said, some of the disparity may not be attributable PURELY to the likelihood that heterosexual male readers don't want to look at beefcake.  It may also be attributable to the cultural fact that men think that other men in revealing duds look unmanly, if not outright gay.  I mentioned in FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 1 that there had been male heroes that showed a lot of skin without seeming unmanned, as with Hawkman and Sub-Mariner.

But should a counterexample be needed, here's Cosmic Boy from some 1970s LEGION tale:

More to come in Part 2.

TAKE THE COMIC BOOK "SEXUAL EMBODIMENT" TEST, PART 2

In FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 2 I observed with incredulity the way a certain contingent of comics-fandom gave Kelly Thompson a free pass re: the evidence she presented with regard to the “hyper-sexualization” of female comics-characters. Despite the fact that Thompson constructed her case on the assertion that this or that character was “regularly unzipped” and so on, she gave no indication as to what time-frame these representations regularly took place, be it in the last ten months or the last ten years. It was entirely OK for Thompson to present what one respondent to my essays called “anecdotal evidence.” However, when I presented a point-of-view that mitigated Thompson’s one-sided perspective on gender representation, more than one respondent wanted chapter-and-verse, scientifically redundant, DNA-tested evidence coming out the wazoo. If I didn’t present same, that lack proved me a no-good ultraconservative defender of sexual oppression.




All this supposed demand for rigor, of course, was merely a cover to reject any observation that might mitigate the narrative of female victimization via so-called “objectification.” From a rhetorical standpoint, there’s nothing a preacher loves better than the devil against which he preaches. Without that object of scorn and detestation, the preacher’s got no audience. For most ultraliberals, the objectification of fictional female characters is one of their personal devils, and perdition help the critic who dares suggest that sexual representation, whether in comics or any other medium, might be a two-way street.



One of those respondents challenged me to show evidence of my claim that male characters in comics were also sexually embodied—apparently with the sense that even if I could show such, it would be meaningless unless I could show total parity with female sexual embodiment. I imagine he thought that the only possible rebuttal to Thompson’s imputations of inequality in “No, It’s Not Equal” would be to prove such parity. At no time did I claim that fiction aimed at a male audience would not contain a disproportionate quantity of sexualized depictions of females. What I did claim was that there was an ongoing process of embodiment that applied to both male and female character-construction, and that male characters were constructed to be appealing to female characters within the comic-book diegesis.



I mentioned on that comments-thread that I was meditating on a possible way to take a fair sampling of a batch of contemporary comic books and examine them for both male and female sexual embodiment, in contradistinction to Thompson’s skewed analysis. Given that I had in another essay touted some titles in DC’s “New 52” as representing a new development in the formulation of adult pulp, it occurred to me, “What if I performed such a survey on every New 52 title within a given month?” Limited though such a sampling would be, it would be better than Thompson’s “anecdotal” overview.



But, given the righteous attitudes displayed by most of my respondents, I thought twice. “Why bother with a full month survey, given that most fans are so in love with being blinkered and judgmental that they’ll never alter their opinions no matter what evidence is produced?” So I saved my money and, when a sale came round at a local comics-shop, I simply bought the back issues I wanted anyway and decided to use that as my sampling.

As explained in Part 1, I’m breaking down the sexual representations in each comic surveyed in terms of my deductive categories, GLAMOR, TITILLATION, and PORNIFICATION. I imagine that another easy way to dismiss my formulations would be to simply disagree with these divisions. A thoughtful critique is certainly possible.  However it's more likely most fans would just fall back to the victimization position, implying that a costume showing bare legs (an example of GLAMOR, usually) is exactly as bad as a costume that looks like Victoria’s Secret lingerie (PORNIFICATION, of course). Should anyone make this assertion, assume that I've already deemed it unilaterally stupid and move on.



I’m not counting every sexually embodied image in every one of these titles. Rather, I’m going by page-count. A book with “5 counts of GLAMOR” means five pages on which some GLAMOR-ous image is presented for the reader’s possible delectation. Covers count as only one page, though ads are not counted.
It's impossible to state that a given drawing carries the concept of sexual embodiment for everyone.  However, I focused on those drawings that at least showed enough of at least one face, one figure or the two together to connote sexual attractiveness.


Here goes.



BATGIRL #7— No counts of male sexual embodiment. 8 counts of female sexual embodiment of the GLAMOR type.

BATGIRL #8—No counts of male embodiment. 6 counts of female GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #1 – 13 counts of female TITILLATION. 7 counts of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #2 – 17 counts of female TITILLATION. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

BIRDS OF PREY #3 – 14 counts of female TITILLATION. No counts of male embodiment.

BLACKHAWK #1 – 6 pages male GLAMOR. 7 pages female GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #5 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male GLAMOR.

CATWOMAN #6—11 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 4 counts of male PORNIFICATION. (And yes, they’re all Batman.)

CATWOMAN #7 – 7 counts of female PORNIFICATION. 2 counts of male PORNIFICATION.

RED HOOD AND OUTLAWS #2 – 1 count of male TITILLATION. 2 counts of female TITILLATION. 3 counts of female PORNIFICATION.

SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1—11 counts of male GLAMOR. No counts of female embodiment.

SUPERGIRL #1—11 counts of female GLAMOR. 1 count of male GLAMOR.

SUPERGIRL #2 – 16 counts of female GLAMOR. 16 counts of male GLAMOR.

If I wished to invest in a scanner to reproduce all the relevant pages, I could make arguments for all my categorizations—but again, that would involve spending money to prove my conclusions to an audience in love with defending victims—or what they like to imagine as victims.

Will that be my final word on the mélange known as “No, It’s Not Equal?”


Magic eightball says, “Maybe for now.”